Art: Toward a New Slang

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This sounds like the traditional functionalist, machine-for-living argument, but it is not. The question is not how to "allow for" people's work and movement in a given building; it is how to design a structure as the uncrimping skin of human action, growing round its paths and patterns in an absolutely candid way. "You start with what people do—not with what you think they ought to do." Johansen follows this up with belligerent commitment. While designing a low-income housing project in The Bronx recently, he threatened "to break every stick of furniture in the goddam conference room" because the housing authorities would not allow him to design the front stoops that, as everyone but housing authorities knows, are a basic social-gathering place for city dwellers. (He won the point.)

Commonsense Circuitry. Some of Oklahoma City's more conservative people dislike the Mummers Theater because it reminds them of a factory. It is in fact an exquisitely human building in its scale, organization and intriguing unpredictabilities. But the comparison would not, in any case, offend

Johansen. The ordering model he used in thinking it out—through eight years of close collaboration with the theater's director, Mack Seism, and David Hays, a prominent stage designer—was that of electronic circuitry. "My whole design," he says, "can really be stated in terms of components—the two main theaters—with subcomponents like offices attached, plugged into the backstage facilities and wired together with circuiting systems. Circuits for the audience, for the actors, for air conditioning and so on." After that, all that is left is styling, a process to which Johansen (like the Archigram group in England, whose experiments he admires) is utterly indifferent. "The façade disappears," he says. The result is that his work has a refreshingly explicit look: not fetishistic or overly concerned with detail, but imbued with a commonsensical directness as to ways and means.

Open to Change. Renaissance planning, in terms of axis and façade and fixed viewpoint, cannot work in today's web of combination and change, and the shifting elements and separated blocks of the Mummers Theater are Johansen's tentative statement of a fluidity that, he believes, architecture must either reach or perish. "I never liked permanent solutions," he says. "One of the things that got me in Rome was the idea of a building as a palimpsest, the record of time and change. You see a row of 2nd century arches with a 16th century building capped onto the top, and then new outgrowths, even the television aerials. That's great, it lives." Any building should be "open to change," because if it is not, it will in time come to predict wrongly and then distort the needs of its occupants. If the director discovers the need for, say, a library, he can build a new unit for it and link it to the original building with a new people-tube at any convenient point. The motto is: "Don't build for the ages; let the ages build for you." Like all advanced architecture, Johansen's theater is a gamble with public taste, but its terse pragmatism is so logical that it seems a pointer to a very likely future.

Robert Hughes